This invention relates to Internet marketing of product/service promotion and sales, but more specifically, to a method and system to monitor consumer demand and to generate marketing and sales options in response thereto.
With every news article, comment, company, new product or service that becomes available online, the Internet continues to expand. Current web tools fail to address the problems of information complexity and overload. Past solutions have relied on publishers defining the content to be made available via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds (or other general exportable formats available), common formats such as XML, proprietary formats by site publishers, or by providing tools for the selection and storage of portions of the web that interest a given user. These solutions suffer from significant drawbacks for either the consumer and or the marketer, and ultimately fail to provide clarity amidst an overloaded and overly complex Internet. With its ever increasing vastness, the Internet is failing to optimize the process of helping people find what they want, compare, stay informed, share, and or discover new information. And likewise, it is failing to provide a true method for consumers (and businesses) to declare what they want and therefore facilitate a more efficient method of marketing and sales—one to one.
Introduction of Aggregating Filtering Techniques
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) was first used to allow for quick incorporation and usage of content from one source or site to another, by providing a basic format for publishers to select and present information that could be integrated into third party sites and later read as feeds by individual (consumer) reading software, which parsed and formatted the data according to the rules embedded in the RSS or Extensible Markup Language (XML) or its derivatives.
Over the past several years, RSS has been used as the underlying technology for providing information aggregation and filtering services. For example by aggregating and different feeds and incorporating textual analysis techniques, Internet firms have been able to save consumers and businesses time by sorting through information from the site publishers and presenting information that meets a particular criteria defined by the user.
Commercial attempts have been made to address some of the problems of growing information, in particular content overload as firms such as Twine, Iterasi and iLeonard, Filtrbox (see attached articles) and Google Alerts have sought automated solutions to help one filter information. These firms seek to aggregate feeds or access services that aggregate feeds (i.e. firms using Google Alerts to apply their own filtering techniques) in order to filter information that disseminated or notify based on a the presence of a user selected keyword or phrase.
RSS, even in new or similar formats suffers from its inability to handle dynamically changing data, as it fails to incorporate frequency and timing of delivery as well as a method for viewing versions over time. Likewise, once published the RSS format fails to have any built in version tracking or history capture, thus making it a transactional method of data aggregation and review. In addition, much of the what is available on the net, commerce, advertising and search (general and specific) included, along with many consumer (e.g. blogs, wikis, etc.) and professionally published sites, lack RSS capabilities. The true weaknesses of RSS in handling dynamic data are revealed.
Web-Clipping and Other Static Reference and Storage Methods
In addition, there have been advances in techniques to select and capture data (including text, pictures, video) from a webpage or website primarily for reference in the form of bookmarks, which permit one to return to a given site address or URL (universal resource locator) or other services which permit “clipping” of specific content from a site for sharing and storage. Bookmarks suffer from the inability to select specific content as well as from the ability to deal with the dynamic nature of the content that my be on a page—it is only a method of taking you back to a web address, it fails to provide a method for determining if any of the content on the address changed or has been moved. Thus, it is like having an address to a friend, with you returning to the house, you realize that they no longer live there—you wasted a trip and have no way of knowing where they have moved to . . . .
In addition, other firms have sought to provide tools which allow consumers to collect or “clip” pieces of information or content on the web as they surf. Once collected these services provide methods of storage, categorization, search and sharing. Unfortunately, in the long-term there solutions do not solve the problems of information overload (they exacerbate it) as more information is added even as the information gets older and older in storage. Further, clipping services, such as Notemarks™ or Clipmarks™ or Evernote, fail to be relevant for all types of sites such as commerce sites or search engines, advertising (or ad networks) or other resources such as feeds. The present invention makes the timeliness of the information relevant—not just when it was created, but also when a particular resource became web accessible. If it is web accessible, the present invention allows it to be monitored, manipulated and shared.
While, “feed”-based or “clipping” technologies attempt to provide tools to manage the Internets' vastness and complexity, they suffer greatly because of the underlying systems and methods embedded in their technology which drives their services.
Publisher Driven Approaches to Net Information Overload
Even new offerings in the “Alerts” space such as Alerts.com or Zotify or Web slices embedded in Internet Explorer 8, fail to solve the current information overload and complexity issues across the web. These services rely on current formats such as RSS or new formats for alerts creation, or embedding new code or features in their websites, for it to be accessible for alerts and notifications by a user. These methods are publisher driven and publisher limiting.